Aurea Rivera keeps a Spartan office in Tech Town, with the exception of rows of shiny coins of many sizes.

Indeed, after 33 years at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, or NASIC, Rivera earned dozens of challenge coins — a collage of designs from government and military colleagues showing service at installations all over the country for a litany of organizations in the intelligence community.

“Traveling the world does you good,” the Puerto Rican native tells me in her office as a wall clock ticks — its numerals replaced by complex math equations as intricate as the entrepreneur. “It really does show you that this land here, is the land of opportunity.”

Q: How did you come to Dayton?

A: I was born and raised in Puerto Rico. I knew when I was little I wanted to work in math and science, so after high school I went to University of Puerto Rico for my engineering degree. As a co-op for NASA I ended up at Goddard Spaceflight Center in Maryland, at the tail end of the Apollo program, but before the Space Shuttle began.

I didn’t want to work in aviation but I was interested in aviation, and I read about a program at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. I thought I’d come here, get an advanced degree and become a professor in Puerto Rico.

As life goes, I finished the degree, met the professors, but I never went back to Puerto Rico and I stayed in Dayton. The work was so interesting that I decided to stay.

Q: How was it since then?

A: I worked for NASIC for the next 33 years. I found a niche in a company doing something worthwhile for the nation, and it was fascinating work. As far as the community, Dayton has a small town type of feeling to it. I enjoy it, it’s diverse and I felt welcome.

Q: So, how did you become the ‘Godmother of NASIC’?

A: I had been very privileged to work all kinds of projects in my life. As a technical director for data, one of the projects we had was countries of concern, which are hiding information from the U.S. What wasn’t well known was that intelligence associated with weapons was being moved into the cyber domain. As we saw the nature of data and intelligence changing, I got together with a small group of very smart people, and we came up with a strategy of how we’d go out and find information that other people were hiding from us. Let’s just say that strategy worked. So when I retired they put together the plaque that said ‘Godmother of NASIC data network intelligence.’ It came with a coin that was the number one coin in its series, and it reads, ‘this work was an endeavor of consequence.’ Military coins are very important, and this was given to me by the people who helped me put the program together. They’re running it today.

When I announced my retirement, there was a conversation to put my name on one of the labs, but in government you’ve got to be dead. So I told them to wait a while.

Q: How have your roots changed your perspective as an entrepreneur?

A: My father was a businessman too, and he and I never saw eye-to-eye. But through him I learned that to prove yourself to other people, you have to bring an entrepreneurial mind-set, you need to act and behave in any job as though you’re the owner of the place and treat it like you value it. That’s how you move up — place your boss for success, because that’s your job as their employee. He taught me that.

The Puerto Rican culture is based on person-to-person relationships. To broker a deal, I need to have a relationship with you and we need to have established trust. I took that with me as I became an entrepreneur. At the end of the day business is about relationships that are based on trust.

Q: Have you had any difficulty adjusting in your industry?

A: My only frustration has been that sometimes people don’t look at your idea at the same level. They stop at the person. When people think of tech, they tend to think of young men in their 20s in California. When people look at ideas, sometimes they see me as a Latina woman instead of thinking of it as a high tech idea coming from someone who has been there. We need to get above that, work on the ideas rather than on the person.